


Ratchet Goes to the Math Circle

by 12drakon



Category: Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers: Prime
Genre: Cultural Explorations, Gen, Lost and found voice, Math Kink, Mathematics, Origami, Post-War, Take Your Fandom to Work Day, Warm and Fuzzy Feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-27
Updated: 2016-06-27
Packaged: 2018-07-18 13:59:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7318045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/12drakon/pseuds/12drakon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Cybertronian war has been over for a while, and most robots went home to rebuild their planet. Ratchet stays on Earth as a permanent liaison to the humans. His young friend Raf arranges for Ratchet to sit in on his math circles, so that Ratchet can better understand how humans learn. Last time he tried to help with a science fair, he caused a small disaster, but this time - this time, he wants to do it right!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ratchet Goes to the Math Circle

**Author's Note:**

> Big thanks to [Rizobact](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Rizobact/pseuds/Rizobact/works), [dragonofdispair](http://archiveofourown.org/users/dragonofdispair/pseuds/dragonofdispair/works), and Ray for beta.
> 
> This is a response to the writing challenge http://takeyourfandomtoworkday.tumblr.com/: “whatever you do in real life, it’s time to dump your favorite characters into your workplace. Teach us something about what your life is like!” I help people lead math circles. I designed this one for Raf.
> 
> Origami art by Bertrand Pautremat for Hasbro.

Ratchet swore that this time, he would do it right.

His first foray into helping humans learn featured swearing too, if of a different kind - and also, a small explosion and a giant confused “Huh?” from all the humans involved. No helping, no learning. The humans couldn’t instantly download data into their memory banks; Ratchet had known that, but until the ‘Science Fair Incident’ he’d never quite realized how it played out in teaching.

It was a slagging miracle of the multiverse that organics ever managed to learn anything!

Yet there Raf was, a human juvenile who had learned quickly enough to become a notable force in ending the war. Speaking Cybertronian, hacking their tech, becoming a soldier. But still, living the life of a _child_ (another alien concept): pretend-playing, watching silly shows… and now, taking his robot friend to his math circle.

Raf was already at the parking lot when Ratchet exited the green swirling portal of the ground bridge, pale in the sun. They said hello, then did their usual routine: Ratchet crouched and put his hand on the ground, Raf sat on his palm and put one arm along his thumb. The arm and the thumb were about the same length, so it was like a hug - comfortably equal. Ratchet lifted Raf to sit on his shoulder. The few passersby stared, waved, took selfies, then went on with their lives - nothing like the frantic crowds and screaming fits of the first few months after the war.

Raf pointed across the street at a truck-size garage. Its door was up, and over it, the sign read _Makerspace_. Each letter was welded out of brightly painted, mismatched pieces of metal things. Ratchet liked the style: playful, can-do, and just a touch macabre.

He entered, stopped by the door, and let Raf down. Wheeljack the mechanic would feel right at home. Some shelves by the walls were piled with machine and computer parts, others featured clean, sorted tools. Here and there stood a few larger, well-used mechanisms for cutting things apart and welding things together. Toward the far wall, by a large window to a garden, a dozen children and four grown-ups were sitting around several tables.

When a seven-meter-tall orange-white robot entered, the humans stopped talking, folding papers, and doodling. All the children ran up to him, and adults smiled and waved.

“Hi, I am Ratchet, Raf’s friend,” he said, not adding, “you probably know me - they’ve only made me do a couple of thousand interviews this year.” He would follow polite local customs this time, slaggit. “I am here to learn how to lead math circles.”

“Nice to meet you in person! I am Amanda,” said one of the adults. “We are very happy you share our interest, and found the time to come!” She pointed at a new-looking plastic mat by the door. It was assembled of bright pieces, and covered a large enough patch of the paint-stained cement floor. “You can sit there and observe. Hey, everybody, please introduce yourselves to our guest!”

Ratchet recalled an anecdote from his overview of relevant human subcultures: once upon a time, a popular mathematician had absentmindedly told a soldier of an army invading his city not to step on his formulas. Amanda’s nonchalance about a giant alien in her math group felt restful; the multiverse would be nicer if more people just focused on their work. Ratchet sat down, still more than twice as tall as Amanda. He pulled his knees up to take up less space, and put his hand on the floor, palm up: a human-readable invitation to touch.

“I’m Dylan. This is my paper airplane model” - the child who spoke first waved a toy back and forth, pretend-flying. “Do you think it looks like a Seeker?”

Ratchet did a double-take. The diplomatic routines he now had as a Cybertronian liaison on Earth made him say, “A _creative_ model of a Seeker,” instead of, ‘In my medical opinion, this Seeker needs urgent surgery.’

“It’s _our_ model! Many of us helped,” the next child laughed. “I am Kira. I figured out these folds on the wing tips, see? Ailerons!”

“Nice to meet you, Kira,” Ratchet said formally, and made the child beam when he added, “Ailerons are crucial for all maneuvers.”

“You are okay with the Seekers now, right?” This child spoke quietly and very quickly, and was the first to touch - to gently stroke Ratchet’s finger. “Oh, you are warm! Oh, sorry, I just didn’t expect, because you are metal. Raf didn’t want to make Seekers, but he said it’s okay for us. Glad your war is over. Aerodynamic equations are so cool, right? Oh, and I am Sasha.”

“Sasha, it’s all okay,” Ratchet confirmed with a smile, even though the tidbit about Raf’s scars made him cringe inside.

“I am Almost Eight!” the smallest person piped up.

For a crazy moment, Ratchet thought that was a human clone numbered like a Vehicon, but then the child sighed, “A lot of people ask how old I am. I’m Xuan.” Little Xuan put something on Ratchet’s palm - a human datapad. The screen had a diagram: a square, crisscrossed in colored lines, and labelled in letters. At the push of a button the square animated. It folded along the lines until it made itself into the same toy Dylan was holding.

“Ratchet, do you know,” Xuan whispered loudly, as if sharing an awesome piece of gossip, “in origami, you can trisect angles, but with a ruler and a compass, it’s totally absolutely _positively_ impossible to split an angle in three? No way, no how!”

Ratchet shook his head, tagging the puzzling tidbit of Earth culture with # _UnfragLater_ , and Xuan grinned in triumph. By now, the first three children moved back to their table, Sasha poking at a touchscreen with another fold diagram, and others giving advice. Ratchet listened to more names, looked at their projects and puzzles, and did he snark? Not even once!

When all the children went back to their seats, Amanda said, pointing at adults, “This is Jim, Nitya, and Gordon - our awesome volunteers.” They waved, not interrupting what they were doing with the children. “And that,” Amanda waved at the wall opposite to Ratchet’s, “is Vi.”

Vi must have slipped in when Ratchet wasn’t looking. Long hair - gaze down - absolutely still behind a cleaned-out corner of a messy table, with a tablet and some paper on it.

“Hello, Vi,” Ratchet said, trying not to frown. Human needs for linking up varied, but isolation in an intentional group like this was never a good sign. Vi nodded a tiny bit, not looking up, and then froze again. Nobody commented, so this must be usual. Ratchet didn’t ask, but added another puzzle to his _#UnfragLater_ tag.

“Now let’s go back to our regular activities, so Ratchet can observe,” Amanda said, and that was that for the introductions. He listened for a while, sitting quiet and still like Vi was. The humans were trying to figure out how to make their little paper models _transform_ into other paper models.

At first, Ratchet thought the whole endeavor silly. Who uses paper to build transformers? It didn’t seem to work, either. For the last ten minutes, Raf and Kira had been trying to figure out an inverted-fold that would split ends of a rhombus into something resembling fingers of a hand. Ratchet ran a simulation in his mind, thinking it would take a nanoklik to solve - but no. The possibilities of angles, directions, and sizes multiplied exponentially at each step. He couldn’t even figure out if the fold was possible!

He pulled his good datapad out of subspace, the one with a strong AI and a holo display, and made a square of solid light appear over it. Several children pointed at his tool with excited exclamations. Even Vi briefly looked up.

Ratchet folded his solid-light square ‘paper’ into a rhombus (which Kira and Raf called ‘bird base’), and then tried to transform it into a robot hand by the rules of _origami_ (the word Xuan used), which he downloaded from the human internet. No cutting, no stretching.

His first attempt looked worse than the crude claw he had crafted for Ultra Magnus, back when they had been refugees short on supplies. He made a rude ‘Plug it!’ gesture the humans didn’t know, but his AI recognized as an ‘Undo’ command. His puzzle was back at square one. Rhombus one.

Ratchet tried again, made a passable hand, then realized he used a four-dimensional transformation his AI suggested. While not explicitly prohibited by the rules he found, going through the fourth dimension probably counted as cheating in origami. He was beginning to see the root of the difficulty: the puzzle was very open-ended, like synthesizing a totally new molecule. Neat! He peered at his translucent diagram, and noticed that opposite of him, Vi was drawing something on paper. The small left hand holding a pen was moving very quickly, but the curtain of that long hair and the strategically placed right arm made it impossible to see the drawing.

Amanda must have noticed that Vi unfroze, because she came up to within a few steps and stood there smiling. “Vi, would you share your work?” Amanda asked.

There was no response. Amanda didn’t show any sign of impatience, just gave Ratchet a longer glance with the same calm smile: a warning for the new guy not to interfere. He didn’t. In almost a minute, Vi shook her head no, and Amanda went back to the happy noisy tables, where she promptly became all but invisible, because the children were being so much more active.

In about an hour, Raf came to Ratchet (who was so absorbed in his puzzle he’d forgotten to watch the math circle!) and told him it was time to wrap up. Ratchet turned off his pad and looked up; children, volunteers, and more grown-ups who must be parents stood in a smiling, chattering group, glancing at him and waiting - to talk, he assumed.

Ratchet sighed. He had done a lot of media broadcasts, but humans liked to ask the same questions in their own voices, while face to face, because somehow, they learned better that way. He smiled, and waved, and said in his best PR voice, “If we haven’t met yet, hello, I am Ratchet. We can talk for a few minutes if you would like.” He put his open hand down in front of them, in case they wanted to touch.

For a species whose malware spread by physical contact, the humans touched entirely too much.

***

They were almost at Raf’s house, Ratchet in the ambulance mode giving Raf a ride for old times’ sake. They had spent the ride talking about origami. Raf still interned for Unit: E, but they didn’t talk about that, about hacking and research and interplanetary relations. No, it was Ratchet’s time to immerse in how humans learned, so he asked about the math circle.

“Almost like mom!” Raf chuckled. “Thank you for coming. Guests are nice. Engineers are my favorite, but some professors are cool too.” He patted the seat and sniffed. “I miss you, Ratchet. All of you.”

Ratchet understood. They messaged and they met, but it wasn’t the same as living together.

Raf continued, “Everybody was happy you visited. Vi was happy. Well... She was glad.”

“Vi doesn’t… She can’t talk, can she?” Ratchet’s voice caught and spark spasmed. Bumblebee’s vocalizer had grown back in the restored Omega Lock (and Ratchet’s research on Synth-En had contributed). But some scars never healed; sapient beings with stolen voices remained Ratchet’s nightmare. He cycled a vent. “So, Raf, how do you know?”

“I just do,” he shrugged. Ratchet still could not figure out how Raf had learned to understand Bumblebee, but trusted his word on these matters. Yet today, maybe because he promised to help Ratchet learn, Raf made an effort to explain. “See, Vi had been drawing for most of the time. And when I walked by, she didn’t cover her paper - because I brought you. It was Vi’s way of saying thanks, a little gift for me. And some of what she drew was Cybertronian.”

“What?!”

They were there at Raf’s house, but Raf didn’t leave the ambulance. He said, “Yes, Vi sketched what she saw on your holo. She drew parts of the software, some symbols, and parts of my puzzle, because you were solving it. Her sketch had a very good idea I want to try next time. Hey, can you… Will you come again?”

“Yes, I will.” Ratchet blocked out weekly time for Raf’s math circle. He had to refuse meetings with governments, militaries, and (he shuddered) scientists who would as happily disassemble him into constituent nanoparticles as grill him with thousands of questions. He had to understand. The way humans learned - that was important to know, to understand. Raf’s learning was important. Kira, Dylan, Amanda - everyone who made their little circle work, who laughed and hacked and built together - they were important. Vi, very much so.

Maybe one day, Ratchet would see Vi’s drawing.

And maybe one day, he would solve the puzzle of the transforming origami hand!

***

Next week, they had to close and lock the big front door against the plague of journalists. Ratchet had to promise them to stay and answer questions after the math circle was over, and Amanda had to _very firmly_ tell them she had no media releases on any of the children.

Ratchet had downloaded origami axioms to compare with Euclid’s geometry axioms, and gained some understanding of why quaint tools like a ruler and compass still held such meaning for the humans. But Xuan wasn’t interested in talking about that anymore. He moved on to watching zeroes and ones chase one another across the screen in what he claimed was ‘The Game of Life’. Ratchet thought it was no such grand thing. The patterns were too simple to represent even a glitchmouse! Yet Xuan and three more children delighted in making patterns dance in new ways, so Nitya helped them in that investigation. Ratchet did a quick search, found thousands of human articles on the subject, decided it must contain more than meets the eye, and tagged it for later.

Amanda took a break from - what? Ratchet still wasn’t sure how she led the math circle. It looked quantum or magic or some such mysterious slag. She said, “Next time, we’ll have a teleconference with a NASA engineer. They use origami for solar sails. Do you want to bring up anything related to folding and space engineering, from your world?”

“Thank you for telling me _now_.” Ratchet shook his head. “I’ve been trying to keep up, but by the time I unfr… ugh, un _tangle_ a topic, children move on!”

“Welcome to my world,” Amanda laughed. “Oh, and heads-up - you’ll only have five minutes, so maybe you can share just one example and answer a question or two. We plan all events so that children talk most of the time.”

Amanda went back to check on Sasha and Dylan’s group. They were tweaking their models, to make their paper Seekers do tricks in the air. Raf and Kira’s group kept building the transforming origami. So did Ratchet, and so did his AI.

Human typing programs offered to finish a word or a sentence for the user. Ratchet’s AI offered options of folds; of whole sequences of folds that made sense in the context of his design. A high-quality self-learning AI felt telepathic or quantum or magic - because it made one’s project _flow_.

Barely touching the bright holographic hard-light, Ratchet began to fold his square ‘paper’ into a rhombus, and the AI finished it; he pulled two corners inside and up, and the AI formed them into two ‘fingers’, remembering the past dozens of steps; he opened a flap, and… “Ah-ah!” Ratchet chided the AI, who made a sneaky attempt at a subspace maneuver. Again.

The AI couldn’t forget, but it wasn’t sapient and couldn’t _understand_ either.

He dropped the pad on his mat in frustration, offlined his optics, and whispered a few choice Cybertronian curses. In their email exchanges, Amanda had said it would be best if he spent these first few weeks as a regular math circle member. “Relax and play like all the other students - that’s the best way to learn how to lead activities,” she wrote. “Find your own meaning in math, before sharing with others.”

He found his own meaning, all right; its name was _Puzzle Obsession_.

Ratchet onlined his optics, and there was Vi. She stood a few steps away from his pad, staring at it. Slowly, Ratchet moved his hand to the pad, then pushed it closer to Vi. He pushed, and pushed some more, and then she made a step forward, and he froze.

Vi traced her left hand along a yet-invisible line, and the AI drew the line. Then it offered two ghostly-transparent options: mountain-folding the line up, or valley-folding the line down. Vi poked the valley-fold, and the AI kept that one. Vi dragged a corner of the paper over its edge, and AI tucked it through itself - that 4D subspace glitch that felt like a cheat, again! Vi sighed, then perfectly imitated that rude ‘Plug it’ gesture Ratchet had used earlier. He couldn’t help but chortle out loud, but the AI understood the ‘Undo’ command just fine. Vi didn’t even give Ratchet a glance, just traced a fold line before dragging the corner again.

This time, it worked.

Amanda came over to watch, but stood back, apparently to give Vi space. Raf came and stood as still as her, always observant. Vi moved quickly, surely, and the AI kept understanding her just fine. The pad was twice as long as her body, so she had to make large movements, to dance around the model. She reminded Ratchet of Wheeljack’s swordfights. There was a sense of formidable efficiency, yes, but also of harmony, beauty, and humor-sparked joy.

Vi was about to solve ‘his’ puzzle, Ratchet realized, and felt a brief pang of loss. He glanced at Raf, who came over and gave his thumb the usual one-armed hug, as if sensing Ratchet’s need for comfort. He probably knew the feeling well; as happy as these children seemed to _share_ , all sapient beings were a bit possessive of their science and math. Ratchet felt silly that he had to remind himself Vi was not a Decepticon trying to steal his research for the purposes of world domination.

They watched the last fold, the virtual paper turning into a simplified replica of Ratchet’s hand, and then Vi pretend-hugged her creation, just like Raf was still hugging Ratchet.

The time froze. It was quantum, or magic, or something else awesome. Ratchet’s thoughts raced. The implications! Play, learning, maybe research - after all, it was the same AI that helped him invent Synth-En. But mostly, he was happy that Vi found her voice, with a companion who understood.

Ratchet looked at Amanda, who smiled and nodded. He had followed her advice and played; he had given that weird little impractical paper-folding puzzle a chance, and hadn’t snarked, and had trained his AI on enough origami, and then stood back so Vi could dance.

This time, he did all right.


End file.
